The Case AGAINST College

That piece of advice has long been one of the most universal and unquestioned beliefs of the Western world.

College, we’re constantly reminded, is not just the key to a good career and financial security; it’s a virtual baptism into a greater and more fulfilling life.

Yet, as dramatically documented in April’s Whistleblower magazine, “THE COLLEGE ILLUSION,” this almost sacrosanct belief in college is currently disintegrating before our eyes.

Even as Barack Obama attempts to buy off the youth vote by promising ever more government student loans and promoting college as a virtual civil right for the masses, a new reality is taking hold: For many, college is not the smartest thing to pursue after high school.

Obviously, to go into medicine, law, engineering or similar fields requiring standardized formal training and professional certification, higher education is still a must. But the idea, unquestioned for generations, that college is the ideal destination for all high-school graduates – that even those who have no particular interests or career focus should just go to college anyway, take courses, meet people, enjoy the wild social life, and try to obtain some sort of four-year degree while racking up crushing debt – is increasingly being questioned … and rejected.

There are many reasons, the most publicized of which is cost: Like everything else subsidized by government, today’s price-tag on a four-year degree from a prestigious school is stratospheric, meaning most graduates either come from wealthy families, win major scholarships, or – much more often – incur huge debts requiring decades to pay back. Daily news stories spotlight America’s hundreds of thousands of unemployed or underemployed college grads with gigantic debt burdens.

Then there is the jarring reality that the vast majority of professors lean left – many far left. This is no trivial matter, and predictably results in the ongoing indoctrination – some call it brainwashing – of millions of students every year. Indeed, the leftwing, secular-socialist orientation of the modern university has played a gigantic role in the steady transformation of the American mind.

“When young people’s values and common sense are hammered and manipulated for four or more years by authority figures bent on propagating a leftist worldview,” says Whistleblower Editor David Kupelian, “many students emerge from college profoundly changed – for the worse.”

Alongside the far-left politics is an almost surreal level of in-your-face sexual anarchy – often openly and officially celebrated on campus. And the flipside of such a hyper-sexualized and “tolerant” campus culture is an extreme intolerance toward traditional Judeo-Christian moral and religious values and the students that hold them.

As “THE COLLEGE ILLUSION” documents, the university experience has now racked up so many negatives – while increasingly failing to deliver on the vaunted promise of career and financial security – that young people in the age of the Internet and gee-whiz communications are exploring other ways to obtain the “higher education” they desire.

Highlights of “THE COLLEGE ILLUSION” include:
• “The very high cost of college” by Joseph Farah

• “The college illusion” by David Kupelian

• “The college scam” by John Stossel, urging readers to rethink the notion that an expensive degree is necessary for success

• “College students given $100,000 to drop out!” by Art Moore, on why a top tech entrepreneur is paying youngsters to try an alternate route to success

• “Higher education the next bubble to burst?,” on what’s likely to happen to the astronomical cost of college

• “The dangers of ‘higher education'” by Thomas Sowell, on the negative and surprising consequences of the growth of “soft” curricula

• “Colleges as ‘boot camps’ for gay activists” by Bob Unruh, showing how “Queer Studies” amounts to a full-fledged LGBT indoctrination program

• “Major study proves the left owns America’s colleges” by David Horowitz and Eli Lehrer, demonstrating why “Most students graduate without ever taking a class taught by a professor with a conservative viewpoint”

• “Sex in the classroom” by Ben Shapiro, a shocking, eye-opening first-hand account of wanton sexual anarchy on the modern college campus, where the prevailing attitude is: “Homosexuality is perfectly normal. Pedophilia is acceptable. Bestiality is fine.”

• “Women prostituting themselves to pay for school” – although they prefer to call it “seeking an arrangement” between “sugar babies” (students in need of financial support) and “sugar daddies” (older men who provide financial support in exchange for companionship and sex).

• “Student loans now surpass credit card debt” – incredible, but true

• “College freshmen undergo Maoist brainwashing” by David Kupelian, on new students being compelled to endure mandatory “diversity seminars” strikingly similar to personality modification techniques perfected by Chairman Mao Zedong in communist China

• “Is college really worth it?” by Phyllis Schlafly, on why government should get out of higher education to bring down costs

• “Surprise! Psychologist exposes bias in the academy” by Art Moore, on the “statistically impossible” lack of true diversity in America’s universities

• “College: A dangerous place for men” by Phyllis Schlafly, exposing an Obama policy on sex accusations that deems males guilty until proven innocent

• “Far too many people are going to college” by Walter Williams, on how “higher ed” has been dumbed down to keep students coming and the money flowing

• “God’s new Harvard” by Alyssa Farah, on Patrick Henry College, a school America’s founders would have been proud of

• “How Hillsdale thrives with no government aid”

• “A college degree? Not for my kid” by Patrice Lewis, on why, for many, “higher education” no longer has the value it once did

• …and much more!

Fortunately, there is hope! “New options abound,” says Kupelian. “The Internet – as revolutionary today as the Gutenberg printing press was five centuries ago – offers endless opportunities for learning, including taking college courses from home. Trade schools, distance learning, community college, going into business, apprenticeships, internships and a hundred other opportunities beckon.”

He adds: “All that is necessary is to break free of the paralyzing fear that not graduating from college will result in failure. It’s not true.”

First, you’ll get the hottest education video documentary of our time, “Indoctrination: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America.”

Colin Gunn, a Scottish filmmaker and home-school father of seven, takes you on the field trip of a lifetime. Driving an old school bus, Colin and family travel across America, asking probing questions about the origins and social impact of American’s public education system – and getting some truly startling answers.

“Every Christian parent with a child in a government school should see this [movie] … A mass exodus from government schools is the only way to preserve the souls and minds of our children.” – Cal Thomas, syndicated Columnist and Fox News contributor

“IndoctriNation is an extremely important movie. Every church in America should show IndoctriNation. Every Christian should show IndoctriNation to their friends.” – Ted Baehr, founder of MOVIEGUIDE®

Featuring interviews with whistleblower teachers, administrators, students, parents, and others, this film is part documentary, part testimonial, and totally captivating. Above all it is both an encouragement and challenge to the millions of Christians who need to know what God’s Word says about the discipleship and training of the next generation.

WND

Education is not an investment

Exclusive: Vox Day explains why college degrees make no financial sense for many students

Vox Day is a Christian libertarian and author of “The Return of the Great Depression” and “The Irrational Atheist.” He is a member of the SFWA, Mensa and IGDA, and has been down with Madden since 1992. Visit his blog, Vox Popoli.

Bill Gates dropped out of college. Steve Jobs dropped out of college. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college. These famous examples don’t mean that dropping out of college is a blueprint for great financial success, but it does serve as sufficient proof that a college degree is a necessary item in having a successful career, much less living a successful life.

While practically every college and university will cite various studies purporting to prove that a college education is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to those who possess them, the studies are so badly flawed as to be nearly as fraudulent as the degrees the academic institutions are selling. Consider the following factors:

1) The so-called “return on investment” studies do not compare similar populations. The American education system is highly meritocratic, and wide-scale, pre-college testing means that even poor, lower-class, minority individuals are identified and provided subsidized university educations. Since the vast majority of the cognitive elite attend college, whereas relatively few of the cognitively disadvantaged do, comparing college graduates to high-school graduates is not meaningful without first correcting for the average difference in intelligence between the two groups. In other words, it is possible that most of the income gap between the college-educated and the non-college educated is determined by who goes to college rather than by the college degree or the education it purports to represent.

Discover why chasing a degree so often ends in financial and educational chaos with the WND Whistleblower “The College Illusion.”

2) The studies rely upon income data from individuals who graduated as far back as 1981. Given how much the national economy, demographics and college-attending population has changed in the last 30 years, it is simply absurd to think that their historical income patterns have any bearing on those of college students who are graduating this spring, much less matriculating this fall.

3) Few of the studies factor in either actual time-to-graduation or graduation rates. It is deceptive to calculate a return-on-investment assuming four years to graduation and a 100 percent graduation rate when it takes the average college graduate more than four years to graduate, and 40 percent of those who matriculate and “invest” in their educations never graduate and receive neither a degree nor any return on their monetary expenditure.

4) Even the one study that did include actual time-to-graduation and graduation rates, the 2011 Payscale study published by Bloomberg Businessweek, based its average incomes on “about 1,000 … alumni who are full-time, U.S.-based employees.” The problem here should be obvious, as the study systematically discounts all of the unemployed and part-time alumni. This has the effect of significantly exaggerating the average income of college graduates, since it has been recently reported that 53.6 percent of college graduates under the age of 25 are either unemployed or underemployed.

The Payscale study concluded that the average 30-year ROI was $387,501; however, the study did not take into account that the average 2010 college graduate owed $25,250 in college loans upon graduation. And since this debt figure does not include the 40 percent of non-graduating students and the rate of defaults on student loans has risen to 8.8 percent, it should be readily apparent that the interest owed on that seemingly small amount of debt will tend to considerably reduce average ROI from the estimated $387,000. Note that at the current Plus Loan interest rate of 7.9 percent, the 30-year value of that $25,250 in debt is $247,118.

However, the main reason one cannot consider the cost of a college degree to be an investment is because a degree is not transferable and holds no intrinsic value. Unlike stocks, bonds, housing or even art, the owner of a degree cannot sell it. It is no more an investment than an airplane ticket or a bus token. There are, to be sure, many jobs in government and corporate America that require college degrees, but it makes no sense to argue for the intrinsic value of college degrees on the basis of artificial requirements that only have the potential to limit one’s future income.

None of this should be taken to mean that college educations are totally worthless or that it makes no sense for anyone to pursue a college degree. What it does mean, however, is that no prospective college student or parent can blithely accept the results of the return-on-investment studies and expect them to have any meaningful application to any individual situation. Every college decision must stand or fall on its own unique financial merits, and, in many cases, a careful review will demonstrate that taking out a student loan and paying large sums of money in return for a 60 percent chance of obtaining college degree does not make financial sense.

Greg Miller

Does the very pursuit of a college degree warp a man’s psychology and sap his vitality?

In arguably every generation prior to the most recent it was common and even expected for Western man to marry by twenty and be supporting a family soon thereafter. By thirty his quiver was full and his earnings augmented by over a decade of on-the-job proficiency. His prime was occupied with providing for the bearers of his image and his innate need for accomplishment and identity affirmed by obligations he could competently and cheerfully discharge.

Today it is common to find Euro-male pining away on a college campus “searching for himself” in the shadow of his third decade. His employability is less than that of yesteryear’s twelve-year old; his debt mounts as his focus wanes. His interaction with the opposite sex–if any–is kept facile and sterile for morbid fear of conceiving a life that he is financially and emotionally unequipped to support. By the time he either gives up the charade or takes a hopelessly oversupplied paper he is confronted with the fact that he has failed to prepare the foundation that will carry him through life. Without root or orbit, his purpose becomes one of drifting from pleasure to entertainment to distract from the reality that he has squandered his youth and mortgaged his labor becoming nothing.

But then, the reasons for his pitiful condition are an indictment of the very system that our poor passion-spent waif has been brainwashed all his life into making himself a worthy servant of.
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Frank

While our college students were attending school, I attended the workplace with a high paying engineering job and was gaining senority. When they graduated and came into my office, I both mentored and supervised them. They were good at math, but not so good workers and understanding the job. They were unhappy that they were not as highly paid, and because of lesser experience, they got the lesser projects.

Bob MunckTop 50

Frank: They were unhappy that they were not as highly paid

But by the time they were as old as you were then, they were making WAY more money than you. Meanwhile your career had stalled because you can’t do the math and aren’t very good at writing. By the time you were asked to retire, some punk kid from Lehigh was your boss and some other punk kid from Princeton was HIS boss.

terminator XVII

The problem with education is that it is controlled ideologically/financially by the state, a parasitic monopolist of compulsion/coercion, for its own purpose/interest which is usually contrary to that of the non-pol part of the population. Info on how make America (at least) parasitic monopoly-free can be found in the book Democracy-The God That Failed by Hans Hoppe.